Hurrah!

“With the upcoming launches of Skyrim Special Edition and Dishonored 2, we will continue our policy of sending media review copies one day before release,” Bethesda’s Gary Steinman advised at the time.

“While we will continue to work with media, streamers, and YouTubers to support their coverage – both before and after release – we want everyone, including those in the media, to experience our games at the same time.”

Speaking with VG24/7 at QuakeCon, Bethesda’s Pete Hines admits the policy was flawed.

“We did it the first time because there was the whole thing about transparency and companies needing to be transparent,” Hines said Bethesda’s 2016 decision. “We were like, ‘Well, you want us to be transparent, this is what we’re doing’.

“Then it ended up being the focal point and, honestly, we were tired of reading reviews where the first paragraph spent more time talking about our review policy than the game. So we decided we’re not going to keep drawing attention to it – we’ll send out copies and maybe people will start talking about the game instead of talking about policies. So we did.”